Hacker News Reader

Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: what in the world does Mozilla do currently with $375 million a year?

Pay about 1000 employees and host a ton of infrastructure for a bunch of open source projects (including of course Firefox, but also things like Rust, Valgrind, Opus, etc.).

And hopefully saves some part of that for rainy days when search deals will no longer be this profitable.

I think the Firefox OS project was just that, but it didn't work out.

I am not talking just about projects, but about cash in the bank. Once the funding stops you should have enough funds to bridge the gap until you find the next big project. Hopefully as great as Firefox and Rust are. Kudos to Mozilla!

Yes, in principle they should be able to put away enough to operate in perpetuity (albeit on a small budget). It would be interesting to know whether it's happening, presumably the finances are public so it shouldn't be too difficult to to find out.

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

90M USD cash, 140M USD investments in 2014.

Yeah, the Finance Report does have a 2 year delay, though, so some guesswork is still necessary...

Why should they wait and not try to find the next big project right now?

and also influence policies that protect the Internet or support hundreds of local communities that teach the web worldwide [1]

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/communities/

2.6 million per employee? And infrastructure hosting, especially just for bugtracker / source repo / CI cannot be that expensive.

At that, what are the employees doing? Rust is fantastic and important, but Opus has been pretty done for years, Daala is still DOA, isn't Xiph an independent organization?

I think you made a rather basic maths error, it's 375k per employee.

Firefox still gets an enormous amount of development effort. I think people don't notice because Chrome likely just gets an order of magnitude more.

Xiph is independent but I believe Mozilla employs all the core developers. They're currently working on doing for video codecs what Opus did for audio.

I actually think Firefox is currently seeing more development than Chrome and it's just not as noticeable, because a lot of that development goes into unearthing some of the technical debt that they have (Electrolysis for multi-processor integration, WebExtensions for a proper, stable add-on API), or is an investment into the far-reaching future (Servo).

That being said, I'm not actually that well informed about Chrome's development, so it could also be that I've simply missed some of their development plans...

As of 2014: $212 million on software development (presumably mostly salaries?), another ~$100 million on marketing/administration/etc. They appear to put away from $10 to $70 million per year from 2010-2014, and had about $140 million in investment assets (again, 2014).

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/

But that's the foundation, not to be confused with Mozilla Corp.

I've honestly never really understood how the two are actually related and how Mozilla can be both a nonprofit and a corporation. Talking to some Mozilla employees in IRC and in person, they never seem to think too hard about this either.

Yeah, I don't quite understand that either. What I know is that the for-profit is a subsidiary of the non-profit, and they only have it, because non-profits have some legal restrictions which they couldn't quite work with. I think, that's for example how much cash they are allowed to have on the side.

And while I would like to understand it better for curiosity's sake, I'm personally okay with it being the way it is, on the basis that people who understand this stuff better than me don't seem to complain about it.

Like, seriously, journalists just love to report how evil the innocent-thought Mozilla is, and often even drift off into pure nonsense to do so. So, if there really was anything to be said about their for-profit side, I figure, I would have heard of it by now.

Corp was established to accept business contracts and pay taxes under business tax laws, rather than non-profit tax laws (the famous anecdote of IRS at one point in the early days tried to convince Mozilla don't worry about paying as non-profit). But as Mozilla continued to grow, they hired more people and formed a whole corporation where people are paid to work on Mozilla's core projects like FireFox and keeping Mozilla secured. The confusion often occurs at figuring out the outreach programs. Foundation does some outreach, but Mozilla Corps as a whole also do outreach program. For example, I think people who manage ambassadors are Mozilla Corp employees, but correct me if I am wrong. Furthermore, there are developers hired specifically to work on Foundation applications last. My info could be wrong by now...

> The Foundation has a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation (the Corporation). The Corporation serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent and the vast Mozilla community.

...

> The consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the Foundation and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Corporation (collectively “Mozilla”). All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated.

IIUC, receiving revenue would be more complicated if the transactions were undertaken directly with the not-for-profit foundation. Certainly many "non-profits" do receive transactional revenue, i.e. hospitals, but in that case they often have a number of subsidiaries -- for example one subsidiary actually employs the physicians, another signs funding contracts with the NSF/NIH and distributes grant revenue, a holding company owns the buildings, etc. Accounting is complicated (perhaps more accurately: "the tax code is complicated").

Pays (at least one person) over a million dollars a year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

Would you prefer her to work somewhere else for 3x that?

A. Where?

B. Maybe?

Keeps the Web a little more free, I'd say.

Well, Firefox's architecture is currently being completely thrown over for Electrolysis, they are heavily working on their implementation of WebExtensions, and Servo+Rust are starting to take off at the moment, too.

Other than that, Thunderbird could certainly do with a bit of cash and Firefox OS is also currently being rolled out on a few TV sets, so could certainly use some financing to fix up initial bugs.

And if they really have nothing else to finance, they often also just redistribute money to other smaller open-source projects...

Apparently Thunderbird could since didn't they split it into its "own separate" project recently (meaning, stop funding it)? ...

Have you seen their SF office? That's probably a cool million/year alone if not more.

> Honest question: what in the world does Mozilla do currently with $375 million a year?

Halfheartedly trying to catch up with Chrome.

Interesting and great, but ultimately Yak shaving exercises like supporting Rust.

I don't know, but they should really step up their marketing game.

maintaining their byzantine build system for firefox and related projects. it's pretty nuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com